You missed the part with the patches and ssl/tls/dso already built in to the default install, which is for people who don't want to let go of Apache. They also have Apache 2 packages that don't come as part of the default install (kind of like people have to do with Linux). And the fact that they also ship patched Nginx as part of the default install.

Oh, and they are responsible for a number of security fixups, applications, and feature sets that a lot of people take for granted on a daily basis. Do they

The difference is that anonymity means they can still collect all your information, just not your identity. So, you're just one breech away from having all of your information spilled to them. What's more, when it comes to online services and such, the name isn't usually that important, they don't really know that my name is Sir Dragon King of the 4th order of New Castle.

Just because one is anonymous, does not mean that one has privacy, when I go out in public, I'm anonymous, but people can see everything that I do.

I used to run 40+ Ubuntu clients. Unfortunately, Cannonical has added so many new features: Zeitgeist, Mono, Amazon monitoring, Unity, UEFI, MIR, etc. that most of the community left. Their Distrowatch ratings have been plummeting since the glory days of 10.4.

Although the desktop flavor of the month is Mint (an Ubuntu fork) right now, a lot of the crapware is removed, and much of the progress is going back to Debian. I am grateful for the investment by the Benevolent Dictator for Life (Mark Shuttleworth), and the progress that Linux has made because of Cannonical's work. That being said, there is an adage in the Linux user space:

"How do you become a millionaire selling open source software? Start out as a billionaire."

The profit model is broken for Cannonical. It is sad to see it wither.

The profit model is still adapting to the new realities. They are playing as a redhat competitor (support, server versions), in the smartphone/tablet arena (Android? Sailfish? Samsung? Those cover different areas), a market for commercial linux programs, and other services (music, cloud storage, the company is not US based so could distance itself from the NSA monitored crowd, at least not aware that GCHQ is forcing companies to put backdoors... yet) . Redhat took years to be profitable,

Unfortunately mint has some similar tricks, for example they automatically set Open DNS as a DNS provider which means any mistyped addresses or queries intended fit the browser to handle are instead sent to advertising pages.

I'd also argue that removing the search providers Mozilla ships in exchange for one that pays mint (as opposed to the people who actually pay the browser developers) is also ethically questionable.

To be honest, I still have Ubuntu on one computer but on the whole I've moved back to Debian stable. I did try Mint, but found it sufficiently broken in minor ways to be just irritating. Yes, Debian is broken too, in as much as installing codecs and playing media is a complete pain, but it's broken in ways which don't greatly influence things I actually want to do. For my everyday use - writing software, browsing the web, reading email - Debian stable is rock solid and unannoying.

Exactly, it's totally laughable all the fanboys telling Ubuntu users to switch to Mint. And when they get there, they have no Software Center (to Buy apps) and a truck load of Bugs added from hacking Ubuntu code. AC: Ubuntu is #3 on Distrowatch, that shows how much Minty FUD you spew. With Debian at #2 and rising. But DW isn't a real Survey, it's a click counter.

There is nothing wrong with Ubuntu, they have done more to put Linux on radar as a real alternative to Windows than any other distro. For me person

Nothing wrong with Ubuntu, except that the people running it don't understand the concept of production code. They may have fixed a lot of the problems that they introduced with Unity, but I won't be installing another copy any time soon. I just don't trust them to refrain from shipping known broken code. I have a pair of large monitors and that unity shit just does not take large monitors into consideration. Hopefully they've fixed that in the mean time.

As far as I'm concerned, Ubuntu's only purpose is to create the (very fine) basis for Bodhi, which is the Ubuntu platform with E17 Enlightenment instead of Gnome3 and none of that other, special, Canonical weirdness. Damn it's a great distro.

1) Many applications run faster on Ubuntu (and Linux in general), Steam for example. I've noticed Linux on my personal machine to be much faster than the Windows machines I've had to fix.2) I've consistently seen Windows gag on many routine operations. I/O responsiveness on Linux is far more robust than on Windows. Flash causes the entire system to grind to a halt on Windows whereas Linux is still responsive enough to execute a killall plugin-container. Libreoffice on Linux just loads, whereas on Windows it causes the system to hang for several seconds while the libraries are loaded.4) You may be right on this one as well, but Linux has several APIs and toolkits for all sorts of things - window toolkits, networking, and so on.... The only area where you're probably right on this one is stability in the graphics space.

Don't get me wrong, I doubt that desktop GNU/Linux will ever dominate the marketplace, but it's definitely not because of the technical merits of either platform - Linux is lightyears ahead of Windows, and always will be. Linux developers focus on making a good product; Microsoft is more of a marketing/legal company in the tech industry (a la Apple, Oracle), and they focus more of their efforts on licensing, lock-in/out, and general marketing than developing their core product. People don't have to choose Windows (from a technical standpoint) generally don't but Microsoft rarely gives them a choice.

Kind of disagree. Granted, that is an anecdotal evidence, but I had brought my Linux desktop down by just allocating - and actually "touching" - too much memory (like 2x more than physical RAM) in a program of mine. While Windows may also suffer if you decide to memset() a 32GB array, I haven't yet seen the same unresponsiveness of the system - not even Ctrl-Alt-F1 worked.

Also, Linux the kernel is one thing, and Linux the OS is another. Linux graphics stack is certainly not "lightyears ahead" of Windows,

I'll chip in. I've never managed to break a Linux session by hogging all available memory, but Premiere on Windows would frequently force me to reboot when I went overboard with HD video editing. On the other hand, my experience on 3) is completely differente than GP's. Flash on Linux is an unmitigated disaster. It's funny hpw these things go.

Sure, it's always anecdotal. Honestly, I always hesitate wading into argments such as these as the evidence is pretty much always anecdotal or crappy science at best and ultimately prove largely useless.

I don't think I've ever tried max out on memory, but sure the system will grind to a halt once you start swapping. That's true of any system, but at least on Linux (contrary to Windows AFAIK) you have to at least consume all the memory first. Probaby the last time i ever came close to doing that was when I w

From quality assurance perspective, Ubuntu has a long way to go to even touch Windows or Mac.

This means:1) high performance2) applications which do not crash3) features which are fully functional4) consistent and stable APIs

I have a kubuntu tower, an XP tower, a Win 7 notebook and an android phone.1. The notebook is a lot newer than the kubuntu tower and has more memory and a faster processor, but the tower is faster. High performance? You realize that the ten fastest computers in the world run Linux?

1. The notebook is a lot newer than the kubuntu tower and has more memory and a faster processor, but the tower is faster. High performance? You realize that the ten fastest computers in the world run Linux?

I was talking mostly about vanilla Ubuntu. KDE runs much smoother than the Unity desktop. So I can somewhat agree with you regarding that point.

2. Crashy apps have nothing to do with the OS they're running on, shitty progremmers write crashy apps. The only thing I've seen crash on any of the computers in years is Adobe Flash, and it crashes regularly no matter what OS it's running on. Adobe just writes shitty programs.

Linux is just the kernel. You need to pile up a good amount of pieces to make a full OS, and generally a lot of that stuff crashes much more under Linux. On the other hand, the Linux kernel never crashes. Again, it's the userspace OS components which are the problem. What comes to Flash, my experience is not similar: these days I don't see it crash almost ever, and

What comes to Flash, my experience is not similar: these days I don't see it crash almost ever, and this applies to both Windows and Linux.

It's probably what one uses it for. Most radio stations stream with Flash, and after several hours I'll get Adobe's sad Lego face. It doesn't matter what computer is running it. However, the TuneIn app on my phone crashes some too, although not as badly as on the computers.

You know, I have the feeling that you are a bit butthurt and rigorously want to defend Linux for so

Wow, swap the words "ubuntu" and "debian" from that post and it would reflect the reality that _I_ live in.
I'm a software engineer with a pretty extensive sys admin background. I have the technical skills to dive into the code at any level to fix any problem. What I don't have is the TIME to fsck around with rinky dink BS that doesn't pay my bills or feed my kids. I work on advancing MY part of society (scientific applications) and let the desktop developers advance theirs. Which is exactly the reason I s

But what do they define as "identity"?Can they collect your address, or at least guess at it? What about your first or last name, your credit card, your SSN, your IP address. At what point do they have to stop, because one inch more is your "identity".

I imagine their stopping point is long after it would be easy to compute your identity from the information they have already gathered.

You keep on believing that. And be sure to smile to the automated facial recognition system attached to that camera on the ( every ) street corner. ( and building, ATM, cash counter, police car, 2/3 of the people around you posting pictures on facebook..... )

I don't let people take my picture. And I used to work security, so I know how to dodge cameras without having to act suspiciously. Hint, it's not that hard.

What's more, none of those cameras are hooked into anything. In most cases the tapes are deleted within a month as it's just too expensive to have somebody sitting there recording every time that somebody comes into frame. What's more, the cameras are low resolution and designed to be on 24/7, not for high fidelity HDTV.

That's funny, i also have worked in that field and ours was hooked up.

I also know that all the ones on the street corner are active and being record. Not long ago we used it to identify ( using drivers record images ) of some moron that was shooting people on the sidewalk during a rather large event one evening. ( wasn't even daylight )

But if you want to think you know something and can 'dodge cameras', feel free.

The difference is that anonymity means they can still collect all your information, just not your identity.

There's no change in what Canonical collects. It's still the exact same spyware as before. Canonical merely says now that they'll try not to hand out your IP address to other people when they hand out your local searches.

Considering that your post is full of various logical fallacies and general shit, I'll take that advice with a grain of salt.

As far as that handle goes, do you really think that there aren't a ton of people that have the name H. Edwards out there? Edwards is a common name, as the AC pointed out, there were no typos of note in that particular post. There was a more conversational tone to the posting, but considering that grammar wasn't taught during the '90s, there are tons of folks out there that don't both

Anonymity != Privacy because we're in the age of big data [post-gazette.com] where large data sets can be cross-correlated to profile an individual. From stores that track your cell phone [foxbusiness.com] while you're shopping to big chain stores figuring out you're pregnant [nytimes.com], big data techniques are invading your privacy in more and more ways. If you think that anonymous data collection is safe, it's still data collection and despite people's best efforts, we are of course creatures of habit and your repetitive habits allow people to build fingerprints about you. If you have enough data points, even anonymous data points, you can build a profile of an individual, their habits, their likes, their dislikes and where they go on the Internet. If you can take that profile and match it against an individual using other correlating data you've been identified. This has been proven for example in the 2007 Netflix prize competition where anonymous movie reviewers were tracked down. [utexas.edu] There's lots of examples on this and over the past few years, techniques have become much better at picking individuals out of anonymous data sets. [wired.com] More chilling is a study released this year [mit.edu] showed that using in analyzing anonymous cell phone tracking data, 95% of 1.5 million individuals could be identified.

What this means that as long as companies are able to collect data about you, whether tagged or anonymous, you're still being tracked somewhere and that is no guarantee that your privacy is protected. What has to happen to provide privacy is to stop all of the tracking and I don't see companies nor governments giving up that mechanism anytime soon.

I agree with most of your points but there's still the issue of public data sets that the governments either provide for a fee or are required to provide open access to by law. For example in most states when you buy a car, your state's department of motor vehicles will sell that information to anybody willing to pay for it. Oklahoma [newsok.com] and Ohio [cleveland.com] ando other states for example sells residents personal data, along with your birth dates etc. to pretty much anyone to generate revenue. In most cases you can't opt

typing a word in the Dash, pushes the word against (along with the locally-installed scopes) the Canonical servers, the Canonical servers decide the best results, the results are then anonymized and finally landed in the Dash.

The fuck? If you can't see any privacy implications here, you're a dilettante.

And anonymisation of results - what? If I search for "loli president bomb" then that's what's going to get me in trouble, not the results I receive.

I think that I'll hold off on a verdict until I read something written by someone who understands the steps involved and has the English to describe them.

Whatever the case I would expect that sending a search out from one's machine can be turned off, just as can be done now. If one is truly exercised or doesn't trust his favorite network monitoring tool, that bit of scope can be blocked or removed.

If I search for "loli president bomb" then that's what's going to get me in trouble, not the results I receive.

As if the user-agent string wouldn't land you on the watchlist. That wasn't a joke [prisonplanet.com] by the way. And as far as the results you receive, you probably shouldn't trust those either [techdirt.com]. But let's set aside your awesome new indy band name Loli: President Bomb and focus on the real issue here: The gullibility of free software consumers. They are exactly as gullible as Windows and Macintosh users, it would seem: They're trusting an abstract organization that is continuing to collect personally-identifiable information,

Here you are, after plenty of disparaging comments, after almost two years of unrelenting Ubuntu criticism, suggesting that the Linux world still idolizes Ubuntu (the assumption it ever did is a further troll mark)

Now satire's not quite the same as a joke, to be sure, but your use of the "not a joke" idiom to suggest it's factual shows you're either really stupid (and believe it to be a factual account) or really disingenuous (and are trying to induce others to believe it is a factual account); either way, GTFO my/., ok?

Well, it's not your slashdot. You're an AC. And no, I'm not trying to induce others to believe anything... they probably believe things far weirder than anything I could come up with, so what's the point?:)

But that said, it is well-known that Linux developers tend to be more marxist in their thinking and entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political beliefs. Those genuinely are things that the FBI puts people on watch lists for. And there is a visible minority of programmers that collect guns, go hiking, a

Context: This only happens if you type in a word in the textbox "SEARCH YOUR COMPUTER AND ONLINE SOURCES". So yes, then it is going to search online sources. If you don't want this at all then you can disable it, or just remove amazon etc.I think that this possibility to configure your own online and local sources is an huge improvement compared to what people otherwise would do (search google if you want a recipe, something on wikipedia, name of an artist or do an calculation).

As long as it's disabled by default, brings no revenue to the developer (so there's no conflict of interest), and can only be enabled by explicit installation of client software and acknowledgement of an enumeration of clearly worded warnings, it might be ok.

Yeah, this is nonsense, they're still pushing local searches out across the internet without so much as a by-your-leave. No one with a clue will be mollified by it. But I guess no one with a clue would be caught dead using Ubuntu either, so maybe they dont care.

There may, or may not, be a story here. But, the submission is from someone who seems to not have mastered the English language, in which it is written, and therefore it makes little or no sense at all. The submisison is completely worthless.

Whether or not Ubuntu has restored any semblance of privacy to the desktop search remains an exercise for the reader. But, I can't be bothered. Ubuntu has broken my trust and I won't be arsed enough to see if they have chosen to change, a little bit, for now. There are still several Linux distributions that still lack the phone home and spyware trojans that Ubuntu has chosen to use.

Its good to know their system now protects the origin of request via Tor, and protects you from identifying your self based on the search content by searching and encrypted copy of their data with your encrypted query using Homomorphic encryption. Its too bad that its still vulnerable though, due to traffic pattern analysis, and measurement of result volumes. Its would just wreck the user experience if they employed proper packet ageing like I2P is planning.

It's a bit of a non-story in my opinion, as I think most people worry about Ubuntu and their direct partners slurping all their search info, whereas this "news" is that they now insert an anonymiser into image URLs [google.com] so that random web site Z doesn't pick up your IP address when your computer tries to render an image.

That's part of the reason I stopped using Ubuntu. Now every install has me spending more time removing bullshit than it took me to do the install itself. resolvconf (especially on servers? WTF), dash, social networking shit, some kind of file indexer that wants net access for some reason...

Thank you. Linux Mint it is. I use a Linux box as part of my digital audio workstation, for offloading processing chores, file-serving, streaming and rendering. I haven't had to do anything to the current one in about three years, and I think it's due for an upgrade.

In which case why don't you start with the one closer to what you want?

I'd rather install Mint and rip out the, well, three things or so I don't want, then try to do the same thing with Ubuntu and find out that "ubuntu-desktop" DEPENDS on $RANDOM_BULLSHIT_I_DONT_WANT and has no reason for being an absolute dependency instead of a suggestion or recommendation.

That I have to use equivs or remove the metapackage and stay on top of updates manually is... dumb. Incredibly, ridiculously dumb.

so the problem was that you type stuff in the dash, that goes to various results providers (scopes) including one that sent it to products.ubuntu.com, which in turn queried the Amazon API for your search term (and the youtube API and some other places) (the new smart scopes thing is a server-side variable bias that it applies to the sources of results). So, products.ubuntu.com gives you some results, in these were some image thumbnail URLs, pointing directly at Amazons image CDN. This means Amazon would see

AFAIR, dash sends the requests to canonical, and canonical relays them to amazon. Maybe not from day one on, but a long time before this "news". Sending them (when no explicit online search is requested) is a bad thing anyway, but this kind of "anonymity" were already provided.

Ubuntu may be upgradable in theory, but it's not really upgradable in practise. When I was using it, I'd have to reinstall every couple of years to fix all the crud that accumulated from multiple version upgrades.

In fact, replacing Ubuntu with Mint on my laptop was faster than a typical Ubuntu version upgrade that I have to leave running all night and hope nothing crashes part-way through and leaves me trying to fix it from the command line. Wipe the old system partitions, install the OS, leave/home as it

I'm still a bit sleepy, but I think that :"I will use anything not made in America" isn't equivalent to "I will not use anything made in America".Slashdot is a no go for the latter, but it's okay for the former.Am I not unright, yes?

This sort of ignorance is bad, but at least it means there's less competition for those of us who realize that places like Nigeria are fast becoming some of the best markets for goods and services in the world.

and have no hardware support, no codex's, and only fsf approved code I think debian or mint would be a better choice if your going to jump ditros. I personally just rip out all of the unity crap out of ubuntu (all of the privacy leacking bloats that goes with it.) and install either a mate or cinnamon DE.